Back when I was at Deutsche Bank I used to help write a Credit Daily with my colleagues. We had to knock it up quickly and get it out before 9:00am however it had to be very high quality, no verbatim reporting. i.e. you couldn’t just say things like “the stock market went up 120 points over night because the Federal Reserve didn’t raise interest rates”. It had to more, it had to be ideas, theories and insights. The people reading it probably manage your pension fund so the tolerance for verbatim information was zero. This is how we got it to be the number one ranked research piece of its type in Australia for many years, we literally gave away IP to our Institutional Investor customers and they gave us back business in return.

Obviously this goes to the much talked about point of successful writing. This could be for blogs, websites or journalism. That is, it must have IP and you must give it away. This blog entry in itself isn’t original up to this point, plenty of people have written about the free IP “hook”.

Here’s some Free IP (I hope)

One observation I will make that is hopefully a little original is that IP is best thought of as something than cannot exist by itself. There are two other aspects to IP and they are the ‘medium’ (see Wikipedia definition) and ‘action’ (self explanatory). The later two can change the nature of the former. So therefore IP isn’t a stand alone concept. If you think it is then you would probably be better describing it as ‘Knowledge’.

The medium in this context is simply the thing, concept or material which is a part of your IP. You could liken it to an original idea of an artist. The idea manifests itself in a medium say clay. Equally that same IP could be applied to canvas a different medium. The choice of medium can have distinctly different results and thus IP then becomes more than just IP, it is an opportunity. If the artist had chosen canvas instead of clay she may have been the winner of an Archibald prize for art. So if this were two different artists, in theory the IP has different value based on the medium they used. By definition the IP is therefore different.

Here’s an example in the Saasu business

It relates to our future release of Enterprise Online Accounting. Some time ago we decided we wanted to get into the area of saving customers money on their expenses. As an example, they would be coding expense information into Saasu, say a phone bill, and we would offer them alternate Telco offerings for this service on a permission advertising basis. I haven’t seen any accounting systems doing this in a real time online environment. The PC gaming industry is doing it via displaying coke adds on billboards on the rendered background scenery. So while you drive your Ferrari around the virtual streets of a computer game you get pounded with interruption market on bill boards and the sides of other cars. It’s big, no sorry a huge business now but still probably not as big as we are about to get into for high value services bought buy accountants and business owners. I predict this will pervade the accounting software industry long term.

Some of you are saying, “but that’s like Google Adwords”. Well no, that’s a very different market (medium). Our market is users of an online accounting application who in most cases own their business or at a minimum are running a business (qualified buyers). They probably have a cheque book (purchasing power) and they usually make the expenditure calls for the business (decision power). There is light years of difference in this person, our customer, our demographic, when compared to a person from a general demographic surfing the net and being served display adds and banner advertising content.

So in this example a variation of IP when applied to a different market demographic had generated fresh IP. IP is more complex than just saying I have an idea and then jumping straight to calling it “my IP”.